routines, and there was no TV." Shy
and bespectacled, with her mother's
freckles and carroty hair, she was a
bookworm, with little interest in the
sea. On the day of the launch, she was
deep into a biography of Thomas Edi-
son, and she later reorganized the ship's
library according to the Dewey decimal
system. (Latham, for his part, favored
medical and engineering texts. "It's
simple logistics," he told me. "If you
take novels on board, you need a cubic
yard. If you take technical manuals, you
need cubic feet.") It was only later, Ra-
chel says, that she realized that she had
begun a great adventure.
Building the tug had put the family
seventy-five thousand dollars in debt,
despite all Latham's economies and a
loan from his mother. Given that theyd
never made more than a few thousand a
year, this was a fortune-the payments
on the engines alone came to fifteen
hundred a month. To stay afloat, the
tug had to keep moving, stringing jobs
together from one port to the next, in
what was known as tramping. Their
first well-paying job took them from
Miami to Walker's Cay, in the Baha-
mas, towing a bargeload of red golf carts
for Bebe Rebozo, the Florida banker
and a close personal friend of Richard
Nixon. Later, they hauled loads up and
down the East Coast, to the Caribbean
and South America. They took I -beams
to Trinidad and nuclear-reactor vessels
to Norfolk and N ew York. They carried
bauxite-mining equipment into British
Guiana and drill pipe up the Amazon,
hanging kerosene lanterns to light their
way. They salvaged a ship full of green
bananas off Puerto Rico and towed
blacks trap molasses to rum distilleries in
Barbados, St. Thomas, St. Martin, and
Puerto Rico.
'When we started out, you could do
anything," Elsbeth says. "You could
pick up your crew from the homeless
section of the DuPont Plaza parking
lot and take' em out and sober' em up."
They called them "tug trash" in those
days-big, beer-swollen men who
lurched from boat to boat for thirty or
forty dollars a day and a square meal or
two. "The other tugboats, they always
went for the old alkies and the deadbeat
people," Elsbeth says. "We took a
different approach." For the first six
months, Hans Peter N ewe served as
92 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 19,2010
co-captain and crew, but the rumble
and smoke of the engines eventually
drove him off (He later made two solo
crossings of the Atlantic in a small
boat, Latham says, then moved to Be-
lize to build wooden ships.) To replace
him, Latham took to hiring any sailor
or surfer who wandered past, and
whose conversation he could half abide.
"I t was the time of the flower children,
the Beatles, and the long skirts," Els-
beth says. "We found people every-
where, just everywhere-beautiful
young people. These hippies would
come down on a one-way ticket from
Florida to Rincón, Puerto Rico, and
theyd run out of money and get des-
perate. So we'd hire them just for the
ride back to the States." At one point,
a young Harvard-trained physician
named Andrew Weil tried to hitch a
ride to South America, hoping to study
hallucinogens and higher conscious-
ness. (His research was later the basis
for his best-seller "The Natural Mind.")
Latham declined to take him. "He had
the most unnatural fucking mind that
I've ever seen," he says. "He would have
been a very heavy burden to carry
through the jungle."
When regulations began to tighten,
in the seventies, and a minimum of two
licensed sailors were required on every
tug, Latham and Elsbeth both put in
for captain's licenses. She got hers first.
"He didn't study for the test," she says.
"He thought he knew everything al-
ready." Elsbeth took charge of the girls'
education as well. In the back pages of
National Geographic, she had found an
advertisement for the Calvert Home-
school Curriculum-a venerable sys-
tem of textbooks, worksheets, and
school supplies that American service-
men had long used. The girls would
have class in the morning and do as-
signments after lunch. In the after-
noons, theyd paint with watercolors,
practice the piano, or sit around sing-
ing Joan Baez songs or the Irish rebel
ballads that Elsbeth loved.
In those early, vagabonding years,
Rachel would spend hours just staring
at the sea and its quicksilver light. "I was
immersed in this fairy world," she says,
"imagining all the possible places or
lives for myself, wondering how far the
ocean went, or how it would be if I
could walk on top of it, or run beside the
boat. What it would be like if I fell in."
When they reached shore, on their mo-
lasses runs to Puerto Rico, she and Rhea
would visit the wooden cargo ships that
brought salt from Anguilla, and watch
the sailors slap dominoes on the dock.
Or theyd wander into Old San Juan,
pushing their little sister Rebekah in a
stroller across the cobblestones. (She
was born in Florida, in 1970, and they
were back on the boat five days later.) If
they were lucky, their mother would
take them to the fortress of El Morro
for a history lesson, or to the Librería
Escorial, to buy Magnum Easy Eye
editions of Charles Dickens or Jack
London.
As for Latham, his opinion of for-
mal schooling hadn't improved much,
Rachel says. "It was 'Oh, they can't
teach you anything. Y ou'lliearn more
here in the real world.' " Still, if the
mood seized him, he might take them
on the deck to look through a sextant
or trace constellations, or teach them to
tie a Turk's Head knot or a Monkeys
Fist. Now and again, he dropped them
off on desert islands with Elsbeth, to
spend the day dashing through the surf
or leaping off dunes-or, on one moon-
lit beach in French Guiana, to watch
baby sea turtles shuck off their shells
and scutde to the water. By the time
the tug returned, the children would be
burned to blistering. "My father's sense
was that what doesn't hurt them will
just make them stronger," Rachel says.
At night, if their cabin was too
stifling and hot from the engines throb-
bing next door, theyd drag their bed-
sheets outside and crawl into the Bos-
ton whaler on deck, to drift asleep
beneath the spangled skywhile Elsbeth
played piano. "We just had this ex-
traordinary sense of being wild and
free," Rachel says.
I f life on the tug seemed a romantic
endeavor to Latham-"Are you kid-
ding?" he told me. 'We wanted to see
the world!"-it was often a grind for
Elsbeth. In addition to teaching and
taking care of the children, she cooked,
stood watch, managed the crew, and oc-
casionally hauled the ropes. "I worked
tremendously hard," she told me. "Phys-
ically hard. I did always long for more
time ashore. But even when the tug was
paid for Latham wouldn't stop."